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David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Body & Paint,
the first U.S. solo exhibition by Los Angeles based painter Amy
Bessone. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 8th
from 7 to 10pm, and the exhibition will be on view through October
13th. Bessone unveils four new large-scale figurative paintings that
challenge notions of representation and femininity, while asserting the
power of painting to act as both a sensual and elegantly political
medium.
Bessone’s
new works are based on photographs of porcelain female figurines culled
from auction catalogs. Their paradigmatic postures evoke the archetypes
both of classical sculpture and early studio photography. Accompanied
only by minimally worked pedestals, the figures are aggressively
decontextualized. The viewer must weather a head-on confrontation with
the “anatomy” of these porcelain objects, positioned as they are at the
forefront of the frame.
Three
of the paintings feature young pistillate female nudes, their eyes
averted, but solid breasts and thighs presented with near-pornographic
forwardness. Their origins as porcelain tchotchke, however, pose a
challenge to this sense of bodily exposure. The fourth, an older woman
staring vainly into a mirror, is less of an Edenic ideal. If feminist
theory has the “male gaze” transforming the woman into an object, what
are the implications of this woman – who is technically an object to
begin with – turning her own gaze upon herself? As the oldest model
featured, she seems to indicate movement towards self-awareness.
Indeed, these works serve as a record of constant metamorphoses: in
scale, dimension (from object to staged photograph to painting), and
cultural value.
These
paintings alternate between reading as representations of real bodies
and as images of imperfectly crafted figurines. Although her models are
kitsch objects, Bessone paints with sincerity, earnestly mimicking both
the realism and marked imperfections of the tiny porcelain sculptures.
Fingers are more paw-like than human, and idiosyncrasies of the molds
are transferred to the canvas, reminding us that this is a
representation many times over. Furthermore, Bessone frequently
reproduces the ‘Home Shopping Network’ style of lighting from the
catalog photographs she references, affording the paintings a cinematic
quality. By inserting herself into a lineage of many stages of
mediation, Bessone simultaneously kills and highlights the agency of
the artist.
This
work contends with the history of figuration, the monument, and the
long tradition of rendering sculptures two-dimensionally. But Bessone
takes the art historical canon and explodes it. In representing
collectible knick-knacks locked in poses reminiscent of classical
nudes, Bessone underscores the trickle down effect between “high” and
“low” art. On the other hand, by representing them in paint, she
elevates the objects referenced in her work, thus illustrating the
wafting up from “low” to “high,” and further asserting the irrelevance
of hierarchies of cultural production. The importance of context and
presentation in both the art world and the market for these porcelain
collector’s items underscores the parallels between the two,
identifying both as traffickers in luxury goods.
The
demure bearing common to all four figures counters the confrontational
tone of Bessone’s canvases. This parallels a tension in her practice
between political engagement and withdrawal into the act and traditions
of painting. When Bessone began her career in the early 1990s, she
sidestepped both contemporary trends towards irony and the overtly
political sensibility embraced by many female artists of the era. She
presents a complexly mediated and critically loaded examination of the
female form, but the paintings are neither didactic nor ironic. Rather,
in their light touch and painterly attention to surfaces, they betray
the pleasure of painting itself.
Amy Bessone will have a solo exhibition at Salon 94 in New York in Spring 2008. She was included in Red Eye: Los Angeles Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2007). In 2005 she participated in the group exhibitions Both Ends Burning at the David Kordansky Gallery and b.a.-ba, un choix dans la collection du Frac Bretagne at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan, France.
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